Selfish Flesh
I just read a most interesting set of blog posts over on Molly and Michael’s blog – on reactions to partners masturbating. I’d ask you to read both posts first. Molly’s is “How I feel When I Am Not Used” and Michael’s is “It’s My Penis and I’ll Wank If I Want To.” The discussion […]
IWD: A Tribute to the Women Who Made Me Who I Am
[View the story “IWD: The Women Who Made Me Who I Am” on Storify]
Private Lives and the Digital Panopticon
In a recent essay on Britain’s “Snooper’s Charter” and the state’s right to intrude in the name of keeping us safe, Simon Jenkins wrote this: “Confidentiality in human relations is integral to personal freedom.” It’s just sitting there, at the end of a paragraph, like a throwaway sentence, but there’s nothing throwaway about it. It’s […]
The Last Cigarette
I thought long and hard about where to put this post. Normally I’d put any post that wasn’t either a piece of creative writing, or a blog post on some subject aligned with writing practice on my Order of Turbulence blog, but it doesn’t get nearly as much traffic as this one gets. And this, […]
The Prison of the Photographed Self
I’m a rabid user of social media – both text and photography and, more recently, I’ve experimented with Periscope which streams video live. Travelling quite a bit – sometimes for work, sometimes for pleasure – I have an unholy fear of being without a 3G connection to feed the social media beast wherever I go. […]
A Brief History of Erotica and What it Has Become
I’m a member of a very vibrant private group on Facebook called The Erotic Literature Appreciation Society. A fair number of its members are some of the writers I most admire. However, what is clear is that, beneath the surface, there is a pretty massive schism as to what we are calling ‘erotica’. Historically, erotica, […]
Why Publishing Doesn’t Matter To Me Anymore
If you’ve hit my website before, you might be wondering why I have most of my short stories and even long series online, instead of in published anthologies. If you take a look at my short works in print page, you will probably notice that in the last year, I’ve submitted almost nothing to editors. […]
All The Sex I Didn’t Have: The Complexity of Consent
There is a pitched battle going on over what counts as consent when it comes to sex. There are feminists who insist that sex following anything that isn’t a wholehearted, absolutely sober ‘yes’ is rape. And behind it, whether intentional or not, this has had the effect of heaping sex with more complexity and misery […]
On Dominance in Erotic Fiction: A few Questions
One of my readers, Sally, left me some questions that I felt required a little more thought and more space than was available in a comments reply, so I’ve answered them here. Her questions were: 1.) As an author of erotic fiction, what assets or personality traits do you believe make the male lead in […]
In Defense of the Offensive
I found it hard to find a good title for this; the one I’ve chosen doesn’t really fit the bill. Our world is becoming more and more complex, and the modes of distribution wider and wider. The internet and digitization of material has meant that barriers to publication – once the purview of mostly wealthy, […]